As Hurricane Harvey approached Friday, they were on high alert. The Freemans lived in a second-floor apartment in Seabrook, but felt anything but safe.
“We learned some lessons and got to higher ground before it hit,” Iraj said. “We weren’t waiting for any mandatory evacuation orders.”
The Freemans, including grandson Ryan Jones, left Seabrook before Harvey, a Category 4 hurricane, made landfall, and stayed with relatives in Cypress, north of Houston until Monday. That’s when they loaded up and headed to Fort Worth, leaving the steady rainfall and devastating flooding behind.
They were among the first evacuees to arrive at the Wilkerson-Greines Activity Center in southeast Fort Worth.
“We’re right there on the water,” Phyllis Freeman said Tuesday morning at Wilkerson-Greines . “That’s the Gulf. We’ve heard from people back home whose apartments and houses are totally flooded out. We didn’t want that to be us.”
The family packed light and bought some clothes and supplies on the way from Cypress to Fort Worth. That drive usually takes about four to five hours, but Monday, Phyllis Freeman said, it took nine.
“We would get some momentum going and all of a sudden another road would be flooded,” Iraj Freeman said. “So we had to turn back and find another road. Just getting out of the Houston area was the hardest part. Every once in a while we would pass some people whose cars had flooded, and they were walking along the highway.”
The Freemans, who were later transferred to Worth Heights Community Center, don’t know when — or if — they’ll be going back to Seabrook. For now, they’re just happy to have a place to stay with their grandson.
“It could be tore up,” Iraj Freeman said of their apartment. “That’s why we took the steps we took from Point A to Point B.”
Reminiscent of Katrina
The first nine evacuees arrived in Fort Worth overnight Monday. They came on their own, city officials said.
Fort Worth officials are anticipating more evacuees and the city is equipped to handle more than 1,000 new guests. Wilkerson-Greines and Worth Heights Community Center are open and the Fort Worth Convention Center has been prepared as a shelter, but has not been opened.
Dallas opened its “mega-shelter” at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center early Tuesday, but not many evacuees had arrived as of 10:45 a.m.
Statewide, the Red Cross reports that about 17,000 evacuees are staying in shelters, but as floodwaters rise, so will that number.
Wilkerson-Greines, which is perhaps best known as a basketball venue, serves as the processing point in Tarrant County. Some evacuees, like the Freemans, will be assigned to another shelter, while others will remain at Wilkerson-Greines.
The emerging scene is somewhat similar to the one that played out exactly 12 years ago, when tens of thousands of evacuees from the New Orleans area fled to the Dallas-Fort Worth area after Hurricane Katrina, living with relatives and friends or in makeshift shelters at churches or city-operated facilities, including Wilkerson-Greines.
Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, and the storm surge in New Orleans breached the levees and flooded more than 80 percent of the city, killing more than 1,800 people and displacing another 250,000.
Fort Worth received a request from the state Monday evening to begin sheltering the evacuees from the coast.
‘We had to leave’
Another family, Blanca Lopez, Ricardo Miranda and their two young daughters got out of Houston just in time.
Water was creeping into their trailer off U.S. 59 from the roof and in through two windows. Outside, the water was almost waist-deep.
But when Lopez saw sparks coming from an electrical socket, she knew they couldn’t ride out Harvey any longer.
“We just wanted to take our daughters away from there,” Lopez said. “We didn’t have anywhere to go, though.”
With the help of a truck driver who pulled their car from a flooded parking lot, they left Houston about 5 a.m. Tuesday.
Like the Freemans, they headed north and ended up at Wilkerson-Greines, where they checked themselves in with both Fort Worth police and with Red Cross personnel before being transferred to another of the city’s shelters.
Lopez said it’s hard not knowing what happened in their wake, but take comfort that their daughters, Belinda, 2, and Jennifer, 1, are safe.
“We don’t know how our home is, or if it caught on fire,” Lopez said. “We don’t know if everything is flooded or not. We’re scared to go back.”
She was on the verge of tears as she described the friends and family that weren’t able to make it out. Parts of Houston have taken on more than 40 inches of rain since Friday.
“We had friends and family that were stuck and were trying to get to us, but they stayed stuck,” Lopez said. “Now we feel bad, because they were trying to leave with us. But our first concern was our daughters. We had to leave.”
(Staff writers Anna Tinsley and Diane Smith contributed to this report.)
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